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I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying / making my feed non-personal. How? I became member of all sorts of group: Buy-N-Sell in my l

I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying / making my feed non-personal. How? I became member of all sorts of group: Buy-N-Sell in my local area, technology groups, 10+ DevOps groups and so on. The quality of posts on these is poor and is irrelevant for me for the most part. So every time I used to open the app out of habit, I would see all non-personal crappy posts and I would close the app in under 10 seconds. Over time my mind hated using FB and clicking on that app went away from my muscle memory without me trying to force any habit changes. Why not just delete the account? FB is still great to find old friends, ex-colleagues who I might have lost contact with. I also use it as my public mic to post stuff that I want to share as widely as I can. It's fun to take on the PMs who design addictive products that influence us at psychological level and beat them at their own game. Bring it on!

sdeepak 8y ago
This is an amazing mind hack. Truly out of the box :D :)
- dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
  I did something similar but for different reasons with several of my puppet FB accounts and man, was it terrible. The amount of gibberish that's out there is enormous. You know something is very wrong if ads become the signal in the noise...
PinkMilkshake 8y ago
> I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying my feed. I did the same thing, but using a different technique. Steps: 1) Taper off - Unfollow everyone who isn't a close friend or family 2) Destroy feed - Unfollow everyone x) Optional step - Delete all your posts and untag all photos. It took me an hour or two but I deleted everything, one by one. A greasemonkey script managed to clear some of it, but the rest I did by hand. I still keep my account, just with nothing on it.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  I did all those steps and quickly realized how useless the platform is. The final step for me was replacing my password with a random string of characters and logging out for good.
ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
I found just deleting the app on my phone was a great way to cut the habit of opening it every time I looked at my phone. I thought I was about ready to delete it after a few days but then suddenly realised that without it I would lose touch with a heap of businesses around town, food trucks, nice takeaways etc, that I wouldn't otherwise know about. Deleting the app has easily cut 90% of the time I was spending on facebook, but my hungry belly still has there :D
- rippeltippel 8y ago
  Why don't you learn to cook? I've heard of a nice cooking enthusiasts group on FB... oh, wait...
  - ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
    I do enjoy cooking but when someone wants to deliver a delicious breakfast to my door on a Sunday morning then I want to know about it :D
- greglindahl 8y ago
  I made myself only use FB via mbasic.facebook.com, it's an awkward enough interface that it helps me minimize using it.
  - 8note 8y ago
    they broke my main use of Facebook for it, which also helps a lot
  - ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
    That is a fantastic idea
- mesarvagya 8y ago
  Well you can create just a fake account with all fake information and no friends, so you use it just for getting out some information from FB.
nitemice 8y ago
I can attest that this would be an effective technique, because recently I accidentally did the opposite. A while back, I did a big clean up of all my groups, likes and (most of my) friends, which greatly improved the signal to noise. Before that, I hardly ever checked FB because there just wasn't anything I really cared about, and if there was it was too well buried. Now, though I find myself checking it, just in case there is something worth seeing. I particularly started doing this after happening on two big surprise stories on there from small businesses that made me think "Lucky I was scrolling through FB, otherwise I wouldn't have known about that". The signal to noise is better, but the problem remains the signal isn't worth receiving most of the time.
- manmal 8y ago
  FOMO is the only reason I haven’t deleted FB. There are some could-be-important-for-work people on there that I would rather not lose contact with. Other than that, I like doing real life things with people 100x more than seeing their polished vacation pics.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    Many interesting events in my area are propagated on FB exclusively, including meetups of my friends :-/
    - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
      Be the change. People are lazy in general and will use whatever is easy and others use not giving too much thought to consequences. In my circles I always openly say "I'd love to, but I don't use Facebook" - so if someone wants to have me included, they need to think about a more democratic way to include others. It's not egoistic - many other people don't use FB either. Excluding them just because a group of people is too blind to notice is a very negative approach.
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        > many other people don't use FB either This is the problem, I'd be literally the only one. I tried it once - of course they didn't exclude me, but a lot of info got to me too late (when I had other plans already) and smaller events not at all.
jypepin 8y ago
That's an interesting strategy and I can't doubt that it works 100%, because, although I used to spend a lot of time on facebook, I find my feed more and more irrelevant now while not liking much irrelevant things. What has been told in Snapchat's leaked memo really resonates to me despite me not using Snapchat - Facebook has become to impersonal to me. I have too many friends, most of them I don't want to loose, because they are family, old friend, (former) coworkers, etc. but that also mean that I use facebook as an address book more than anything else. I don't browse it and I don't post on it.
nmeofthestate 8y ago
I didn't need to do that - the updates from my friends are boring/annoying enough that I avoid FB and mute virtually everyone.
hhjinks 8y ago
Isn't that done sufficiently by just adding all your acquaintances as friends? There are probably a dozen or so people on Facebook whose posts I actually care about. Everything else I could hardly give a shit about.

sdeepak 8y ago

This is an amazing mind hack. Truly out of the box :D :)

dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
I did something similar but for different reasons with several of my puppet FB accounts and man, was it terrible. The amount of gibberish that's out there is enormous. You know something is very wrong if ads become the signal in the noise...

PinkMilkshake 8y ago

> I successfully tricked my mind to not use Facebook by destroying my feed. I did the same thing, but using a different technique. Steps: 1) Taper off - Unfollow everyone who isn't a close friend or family 2) Destroy feed - Unfollow everyone x) Optional step - Delete all your posts and untag all photos. It took me an hour or two but I deleted everything, one by one. A greasemonkey script managed to clear some of it, but the rest I did by hand. I still keep my account, just with nothing on it.

ryandrake 8y ago
I did all those steps and quickly realized how useless the platform is. The final step for me was replacing my password with a random string of characters and logging out for good.

ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago

I found just deleting the app on my phone was a great way to cut the habit of opening it every time I looked at my phone. I thought I was about ready to delete it after a few days but then suddenly realised that without it I would lose touch with a heap of businesses around town, food trucks, nice takeaways etc, that I wouldn't otherwise know about. Deleting the app has easily cut 90% of the time I was spending on facebook, but my hungry belly still has there :D

rippeltippel 8y ago
Why don't you learn to cook? I've heard of a nice cooking enthusiasts group on FB... oh, wait...
- ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
  I do enjoy cooking but when someone wants to deliver a delicious breakfast to my door on a Sunday morning then I want to know about it :D
greglindahl 8y ago
I made myself only use FB via mbasic.facebook.com, it's an awkward enough interface that it helps me minimize using it.
- 8note 8y ago
  they broke my main use of Facebook for it, which also helps a lot
- ElCapitanMarkla 8y ago
  That is a fantastic idea
mesarvagya 8y ago
Well you can create just a fake account with all fake information and no friends, so you use it just for getting out some information from FB.

nitemice 8y ago

I can attest that this would be an effective technique, because recently I accidentally did the opposite. A while back, I did a big clean up of all my groups, likes and (most of my) friends, which greatly improved the signal to noise. Before that, I hardly ever checked FB because there just wasn't anything I really cared about, and if there was it was too well buried. Now, though I find myself checking it, just in case there is something worth seeing. I particularly started doing this after happening on two big surprise stories on there from small businesses that made me think "Lucky I was scrolling through FB, otherwise I wouldn't have known about that". The signal to noise is better, but the problem remains the signal isn't worth receiving most of the time.

manmal 8y ago
FOMO is the only reason I haven’t deleted FB. There are some could-be-important-for-work people on there that I would rather not lose contact with. Other than that, I like doing real life things with people 100x more than seeing their polished vacation pics.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  Many interesting events in my area are propagated on FB exclusively, including meetups of my friends :-/
  - dvfjsdhgfv 8y ago
    Be the change. People are lazy in general and will use whatever is easy and others use not giving too much thought to consequences. In my circles I always openly say "I'd love to, but I don't use Facebook" - so if someone wants to have me included, they need to think about a more democratic way to include others. It's not egoistic - many other people don't use FB either. Excluding them just because a group of people is too blind to notice is a very negative approach.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      > many other people don't use FB either This is the problem, I'd be literally the only one. I tried it once - of course they didn't exclude me, but a lot of info got to me too late (when I had other plans already) and smaller events not at all.

jypepin 8y ago

That's an interesting strategy and I can't doubt that it works 100%, because, although I used to spend a lot of time on facebook, I find my feed more and more irrelevant now while not liking much irrelevant things. What has been told in Snapchat's leaked memo really resonates to me despite me not using Snapchat - Facebook has become to impersonal to me. I have too many friends, most of them I don't want to loose, because they are family, old friend, (former) coworkers, etc. but that also mean that I use facebook as an address book more than anything else. I don't browse it and I don't post on it.

nmeofthestate 8y ago

I didn't need to do that - the updates from my friends are boring/annoying enough that I avoid FB and mute virtually everyone.

hhjinks 8y ago

Isn't that done sufficiently by just adding all your acquaintances as friends? There are probably a dozen or so people on Facebook whose posts I actually care about. Everything else I could hardly give a shit about.